


Rose-coloured

by doublelead



Category: Free!
Genre: Established Relationship, Hijinks & Shenanigans, M/M, Romantic Comedy, Study Date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 23:33:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7953457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublelead/pseuds/doublelead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Then,” Makoto says, with an easy tilt of his head. “Wanna go make a run for it?”</p><p>Rin takes his hand, cold fingers atop of a cold palmtop. Half-dazed, still, he follows Makoto’s lead, beads of rain on the tip of his shoes. A soft tug around his wrist, and they run, together, away from the cover of the bus stop roof.<br/><br/><br/>Alternatively titled, Sousuke is Tired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rose-coloured

Rin thinks he might have been dreaming. Red, _red –_ red cheeks behind a late summer shower. Makoto’s lips pursed tight, eyes – _perhaps_ – locked forward, brows furrowed. Rin couldn’t see, nothing above the lower half of Makoto’s face, raindrops tracing his jaw, his shoulder through white-soaked shirt.

“...Come again?” because Rin doesn’t think he heard right, doesn’t think he’s not still in class, flitting between a warm puddle of midday daydreams and Ogi-sensei droning about the contextual background of Natsume Souseki’s literary works.

Makoto’s intake of breath is sharp in his ears. A split second stop.

“I like you,” loud, over the curtaining rain beyond the bus stop.

He doesn’t hear anything else, above his own heartbeat.

“ _I…!_ ” His chest hurts, overflowing, feelings caught in his throat. He breathes, gathers the courage to push, just a little further, over the edge – connecting – _reaching –_

“ _Like you too!”_

Rin’s love story starts with a fairytale end – a prince-like smile, soft and loving, the two of them together in a quiet corner of the world. Makoto looks like he’s about to cry and Rin wonders – how he must have looked, face dusted red, tear tracks hiding behind raindrops on his cheeks, blurred behind the tears Makoto valiantly rubs away.

He laughs, full and open, and Rin couldn’t help but look. Hair damp, strands curling, Makoto’s eyes shut as he sighs, tension slipping away, settling into quiet chuckles.

“Then,” Makoto says, with an easy tilt of his head. “Wanna go make a run for it?”

Rin takes his hand, cold fingers atop of a cold palmtop. Half-dazed, still, he follows Makoto’s lead, beads of rain on the tip of his shoes. A soft tug around his wrist, and they run, together, away from the cover of the bus stop roof.

\----

 

“ _Ahhh,”_ is his disgusting sigh, when the school bell rings. His classmates look at him with equal parts confusion and contempt. Their opinion doesn’t matter, though, because what do they know – they haven’t been touched by the life-changing phenomenon called _being in_ _reciprocated_ _love._

“Don’t mind him,” Sousuke says, smacking his textbook-pen case-eraser-pencil tower into his bag. “He’s just in his honeymoon phase.”

“I wonder if I should pick Makoto up at school today _ahhh.”_ Rin feels his cheeks redden, so he tries to knead the warmth away, burying his face into his hands.

“As you can clearly see.” He can feel the repulsed wrinkle of Sousuke’s nose directed towards the general vicinity of the back of his neck. “Don’t be an idiot, his school is like five stations away.”

“When you finally get into Haru’s pants, Sousuke, you’ll understand that distance means nothing.” Rin sighs, dreamily, then drops his head on an arm slid across his desk. The sky is so blue and wonderful today, why isn’t everyone just breaking into song the way his heart wants him to. Darkness looms, in his classmates love-untouched souls, it seems.

“Ew,” is Sousuke’s reply, succinct.

“Okay, Kisumi, then?”

“I...” An audibly scandalised pause, then a defeated sigh. “You know what, I’m just going to pretend you didn’t say diddly shit.”

“I’ll send him a message and set you guys up for a date.”

“I will leave you right now–”

“No, you won’t. You don’t know the way to the dorms.”

Sousuke’s last footstep, inches away from the door, resounds clear between them. Rin snickers, watching Sousuke’s shoulder tense, his whole body rigid in embarrassment because he knows – _knows_ with every directionally challenged fibre of his being – that like always, Rin is right.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Rin says, finally getting out of his seat. “Lemme just text Makoto first and then we can go back.”

He finds Sousuke a minute later, behind his heart emoji-filled phone screen, leaning his forehead against the door frame, resigned – like all preferable life options have been robbed away from him – muttering softly mantras of self-healing.

“You’ll understand when you fall in love, buddy.” Rin claps Sousuke’s back reassuringly. “So about that thing with Kisumi...”

“I will spit in your food.”

“Aight, not Kisumi, then.”

“Not,” he growls, pushing himself away from the door and into the hallway. “Anyone.”

Rin shrugs, finding Sousuke’s misguided innocence amusing more than anything. _One day, surely, He’ll see the light. “_ I’m just saying, man.”

  
\----

Their kisses taste like whipped cream and chocolate sauce – which frankly, is kind of sickeningly saccharine, but Rin could live with sweet things, if he kisses them off of Makoto’s nose. He smiles, one that makes his cheeks ache and his heart full, at the sight of Makoto wiping his nose with his sleeves.

“ _Rin!_ ”

“It’s a good look on you.” Cheeky, the slightest bit of teasing.

“I can’t believe you!” He’s pouting, now. Rin wants nothing more to squeeze his cheeks together, kiss him right on the mouth. With the summer starting to fade into the cool beginnings of autumn, Rin can’t really blame it on the heat. It scares him, a little. How fast his heart beats, how light his footsteps feel.

How he shivers, breathless, the moment Makoto’s fingers curl around his.

They walk home together, not quite hand in hand, just their pinkies interlinking. Their shoulders occasionally bump together – first from their proximity, then from playful shoves. Rin braves a peek, looks up behind frays of his hair towards Makoto.

“Rin?” says Makoto, like a whispered secret.

“Yeah?” He likes to think his voice isn’t the slightest bit higher.

“I’m going to get back at you for that thing earlier.” Makoto’s eyes flit away, hiding his embarrassment behind an idle gaze upwards, tracing clouds racing overhead.

Rin wonders what that would entail, but really, maybe, he doesn’t really mind.

“I’ll look forward to it, then,” he snickers into the collar of his shirt.

It’s satisfying, to see Makoto puff out his cheeks, reminiscent of a bristled kitty-cat glaring at him. “You’re not supposed to! _Geez!_ ”

He laughs, bubbling chuckles into the air. Truly, his love story, is a blessed one. The greatest love story ever told.

 

\----

 

“Makoto’s nose is so _soft,_ Sousuke!” Rin gushes into his pillow.

“ _Linear_ _polarisers_ _can be divided into two general categories: absorptive_ _polarisers_ _–_ _”_ Sousuke recites pointedly, actually studying for once in his life. If Rin knew the way to motivate Sousuke to study was to make him listen to his love baloney, he would’ve gotten with Makoto a long time ago.

“I know you’re not studying, that’s _bullshit–”_

“– _the movement of_ _electrons_ _along the length of the wires–_ ”

“You’re just drowning out my voice, _Sousuke_ –”

“– _is reflected backwards along–_ ”

“Sousuke, I want to bite Makoto’s squishy nose.”

An agonised scream echoes across the Samezuka dorms that night. Details are sketchy, but witnesses recall the words, ‘ _Rin, shut the fuck up’_ among various despair-ridden profanities.

 

\----

 

Rei slips and slides into the pool with an undignified yelp. He was still wearing his glasses, so there it is, floating in its majestic, red glory, in the middle of the pool as Rei himself tries to flop back up to the surface. Rin snickers when Rei resurfaces, wheezing. He should feel sorry for the poor lad, he probably has enough water-related problems to last a lifetime and maybe even beyond, but he’s got to admit, Rei’s face is priceless.

“Don’t bully,” Haruka’s voice filters from somewhere beside him.

“Come on.” Rin gestures to the pool, as if the specimen presented should have been self-explanatory. “Look.”

“No.”

Haruka is oddly protective of Rei, it’s kind of cute. _Maybe–_

“No,” Haruka says again.

“I didn’t even say anything yet.”

Haruka wrinkles his nose, and furrows his eyebrows. He doesn’t break eye contact as he fasten his goggles over head, every pull of his muscle judging Rin’s very existence.

“Sousuke?” Rin sighs.

“Sousuke.” Haruka confirms.

With a mocking snap of the rubber band – Rin ought to sue him for that somehow, he won’t stand for this character mockery – Haruka dives into the pool, leaving Rin to look wistfully at the misshapen blob that is Haruka dolphin kicking under refracted light.

He was only trying to make his friends see the light that is a romantic relationship. Much like the one he and Makoto has. Although they’re never going to reach that, no. He and Makoto are much too perfect. The Unattainable Ultimate Level.

The next lane over, away from the ethereal beauty that is his merman friend, is Rei, still floundering around, and for some reason, swatting the water near his glasses to push it towards the edge instead of just _grabbing it and walk._ _Heh_ , he can’t help but smirk, tickled at a small memory that suddenly came forth.

“ _Glasses are for nerds,”_ a nine year old Rin once said to an unamused Sousuke.

“ _That nice kid who helped us in the rain that one time had glasses–”_ Of course, Sousuke’s version of common sense went ignored.

“ _I’m never going to like like anyone with glasses.”_

Tiny little Sousuke rolled his eyes, like the clueless little child he is, not possessing the clairvoyant wisdom Rin possessed at the tender age of a third grader.

 

\----

 

Rin slams open the door to their room with a baited breath, his Makoto report of the day ready to tumble out of his mouth when Sousuke rolls away from his desk on his wheelie chair. He holds up a finger, blurred from his point of view in front of Rin’s open mouth.

“Before you start,” he sighs, all youth he has left sucked out into the void of the air. “I don’t want to know.”

“I didn’t even–”

“ _Tut.”_ Pointed, sharp, an emphasis to his dramatic turn back towards his desk. “ _Tut. Tut._ ” He settles his arms, folded atop of his Physics workbook. “ _Tut. Tut. Tut,_ ” gradually fading into a quiet whisper. “ _Shut the fuck up_ ,” he ends, soft and airy.

“We held hands floating together in the pool.”

“Goodbye, I am sleeping in Nitori and Momo’s room tonight.”

 

\----

 

Rin doesn’t know how he ended up having a date with _the kids_ tagging along, but he probably has to sooner deal with the fact that not every outing with Makoto is a date. _Well,_ it certainly could be. His friends doesn’t have to know.

He sneaks a glance behind Makoto’s shoulder, lips kissing cotton, over top of his shoulder. Sousuke is looking like he’s reciting last week’s geography lesson about mackerel sky. Haruka is looking off to the side, probably thinking about actual mackerel. Absolutely no one is surprised.

Makoto smells like the sun – warm and so much like _home_ , mornings under a canopy of fresh-dried laundry. He can’t help but nuzzle in, pointedly ignores Sousuke’s increasingly deepening wrinkles of complete and utter disgust. Haru is still thinking about mackerel, miso-seasoned probably, this time. He could never guess.

“Rin-chan, please!” Nagisa shouts from somewhere. Rin nearly forgot about _the tag-along children_ to his own downfall. “Not in front of the kids!”

A sad, flattened swirl of ice cream lay miserably on the ground. Rin traces upwards from gaudy blue running shoes to long, long slender legs, all the way up to a fully strapped neon green backpack before landing on a hand – tremors sending vibrations onto red glasses blending into an equally red face.

“R-Rin-san, please!” Rei squeaks between coughs. “How lewd!”

 _Heh,_ Rin thinks. _As expected of a sheltered glasses-adorned cocoon. He has yet bloomed into the beautiful butterfly he will never be._ The very essence of their pure, concentrated affectionate gestures is too profound for Rei to comprehend.

Maybe he’ll buy Rei some rose-coloured glasses, bring some colour into his grey world view.

Out of an act of pure defiance, Rin pushes himself closer towards Makoto. He looks at them, dead in the eyes. Slowly, _agonisingly slow,_ he pointedly raises Makoto’s arm, palm out and towards him in the space between them. Unblinking, expressionless yet somehow challenging, a spitting image of Haruka’s face every other second of the day.

Nagisa coos, feeding into the flames.

His fingers slides up – round Makoto’s wrist and across the back of his hand. He feels Makoto shiver, under his touch.

The first brush of skin, the pads of their fingers connected. Makoto’s hand is warm. Rin wonders if his is, too.

A whisper of air, slipping through. He hears Makoto’s breath hitch, when he squeezes, their hands tightly together. Palm-to-palm, they hold the pulse of their hearts between them.

An audible gasp, this time, near scandalous. Nagisa brings his hand over his mouth in mock surprise. His eyes is absolutely sparkling as he turns to his friends. He is met with varying expressions ranging from general apathy to geographical deliberation to a poor child who looked at a basilisk in the eyes.

None of that matters, though, in the face of on Hazuki Nagisa.

“ _They’re holding hands!_ ” a much too delighted shriek.

 

\----

 

Honestly, Rin would rather have Makoto on his knees in front of him in another situation entirely. He’s not complaining right now, though, no. Not when his knuckles are white with repressed anger and disbelief, hoping sheer force alone could rocket the marks he’s holding from abysmal to galactic. The pins and needles Makoto surely feels around his ankles by now is well-deserved. In the face of _Passing and Failing_ , the choice of how Rin would like to see carpet burn on Makoto’s skin is a definite no-brainer.

“I need to make dinner.”

“I need to help Nanase make dinner.”

He is, however, complaining about the existence of his two traitorous non-wingmen in this scenario. There goes his plans for extra lessons with Makoto tonight.

“Look,” Rin says, an age-old dread. He feels compelled to drag his hand down his face. Wipe away his disappointment with less than stellar English. “You misspelled dinner, Sousuke. You don’t get cooking rights.”

“Isn’t it _‘dienner’_? As in you’ll ‘ _die_ ’ sharing a kitchen with Tachibana?” Sousuke asks, completely serious.

“ _No, what the fuck.”_

“Oh, pardon me. I seem to have mixed it up with your other Tachibana-related mnemonics.”

Rin is about balls-touching close to punching someone. “Why me,” he ghosts against his palms. “Why this,” he breathes to the overhead lights.

“I need to defrost the meat or our dinner is going to be meatsicles,” Haruka says, having the gall to rise from _seiza_ with utmost elegance _._ He dusts his pants off, walks the five-step distance towards the kitchen before stopping. He stops, at the doorway. His hand rests lightly on the _fusuma._ Without turning, he mutters what Rin takes as his last words. “We all know only Rin is into that.”

Rin instead, throws with all the force he can muster, Haruka’s English test into the waste bin. He’d rather not pay for damages inflicted upon the Nanase household.

 

\----

 

“ _Ah–_ ”

Rin thinks he might die, when nearly slips down the last few flight of the stone steps – evading an untimely death.

“Are you okay?”

Rin thinks he might’ve died, when he finds himself in Makoto’s arms – an unintentional tango dip.

“ _Eep_ ,” a tiny little squeak. His brain has all but stopped moving. All he feels is warmth– overwhelming heat– Makoto’s heartbeat on his sleeve– Makoto’s hand on his back– _Makoto–_

“Oh.” Makoto seems to have realised, the position they’re in. His cheeks tint pink, he starts looking towards the sky, the ground, anywhere but Rin’s hair bunched against his sweater.

“Do you think you can…?” Rin coughs, then, fixes his gaze on the street lamp above Makoto’s head. “Lift me up? Let me stand? I don’t think I can do it on my own.”

He feels a tug around his wrist, and he’s on his legs. He barely gets a chance to breathe, to right the world around him, when he feels another pull, softer. A nervous laugh cut short, a small self-deprecating remark stopped. It’s hard to see. Rin feels his face warm. Makoto’s lips on his feather-light, dreamlike.

“Be careful on your way home, yeah?” words muttered to his cheek, a touch, a wisp.

“Y-yeah,” Rin manages behind a gasp. His chest aches. He thinks he feels just a little dizzy, maybe. His mouth is dry, for some reason.“Thanks, Makoto.”

 

\----

 

“ _Hah,_ ” a single sound, astonishingly charged with mockery.

“It was _mortifying_ , Sousuke!” His forehead is going to bruise, from the sound of it. He thinks Sousuke even jumped a little when his head hit the desk. “I thought I was going to die!”

“You are a parody of yourself at this point, Rin. Amazing.”

“I could’ve sworn some divine forces are out to embarrass me.” Whomever they might be, Rin hopes his plea to _please stop, let a man live,_ is heard through a press-wood surface.

“Let’s be real here,” Sousuke pauses, for effect. “There’s nothing divine forces could do to you that you aren’t already doing to yourself.”

 

\----

 

There’s a glasses case on the table, amongst the chaos that are pencil cases and scattered stationary on the table. Its surface is covered with embroidery – a lovely mix of blue and purple woven into morning glories. Rin stops writing, the tip of his pencil hovering a touch above his notebook. He stays fixated on the pattern – the discs and stars the petals are made of. Cute. Minimalistic. Very stylish in that clean, simple way Haruka is.

He smirks, when he hears glass clinking – Haruka settling down next to him with a tray of iced barley tea.

‘ _What?’_ Haruka asks, through the scrunch of his nose.

Rin’s grin grows wider, his best impression of a coyote. _‘Ahh, so you’re a secret glasses, eh?’_

Clearly their telepathic bond isn’t strong enough because Haruka just wrinkles his nose more and looks at Rin like he’s a complete idiot. Either that or Haruka’s just hiding his embarrassment behind a mask of disdain for his dearest friend.

 _Awww,_ he thinks. Haruka can be so _cute_ sometimes. He doesn’t need to embarrassed. Glasses are fine. One of the reasons they will never work out together as a couple – Haruka’s loss more than anything, really – but fine, all things considered. Rin would have to tease him about it one day.

 

\----

 

“Rin?”

_Too close, too close._

“Are you okay?”

_Too warm, too warm, too warm–_

“Do you need a break? I can ask Haru for a cold compress?”

It’s like Haruka isn’t here, the moment morning glories disappear. Sousuke presence fades into the background, pencil scratches and page flicks muted, when Makoto snaps the glasses case closed onto the table.

“Your face is really red...”

Rin struggles to think– how to voice his words, complex grammar structures, post-industrial Japanese literature, too far and out of reach. Makoto is too close, too warm, his hand on Rin’s forehead is too soft. Their lips are a fair distance apart, they have a low table between them, but Rin still _feels_. Intensity, over-sensitivity – green eyes focused solely on him from behind black-rimmed frames–

His breath hitches, tight around his throat. Makoto draws closer, still. He tilts his head – worry. His glasses slip down, a fraction of a movement, down the bridge of his nose. _Makoto is– Makoto–_

_Makoto is wearing glasses._

 

\----

 

Rin’s breakdown happens when he arrives at his dorm. Stumbling through the door, leaning over the door frame for support – the only thing keeping him and his identity on their feet. He staggers across the floor, near lifeless, toe stubbing the wooden parquet. He drops his bag on his bed, somehow finds himself in the communal bathroom after a blink, too dazed and out of it to remember how and when he got here. His face is wet, water trailing down a lock of hair sticking to his face. He blinks out the drops away from his eyelashes, looks up find his eyes locked with Sousuke’s through the mirror.

“Heh,” absolute mirth, a mocking one-sided quirk of Sousuke’s lips. It hurts to look at his eyes, at his raised eyebrows, Rin’s pride is _hurt enough already–_

“Sousuke...” Rin says, gravely, knuckles white from his death grip on washbasin rim. A drop of water slides down into the drain. _Fitting,_ he thinks. The universe’s sense of timing is uncanny.

“Ah?” Non committal, footsteps moving away, echoing through the otherwise empty bathroom.

“Makoto wears glasses.”

Sousuke’s reply comes in the form of belt clinking and the sound of a pulled zipper.

“Look,” Rin takes a step back, the world around him spins, he loses his grip on reality as his vision blurs, blurs, _blurs_ around the pants sagged around Sousuke’s hips. “You don’t understand!” His head hurts. Hysterical. Sense of self slipping further away. “This against goes everything I stand for, _the very foundation of my existence._ ”

Rin stops, looks at the stripe of lonely green moss in between the bathroom tiles. Someone should really wash that out. Pulse loud in his ears, fist balled tight now slack, fingers lifelessly knocking against the material of his trousers.

“You have to help me,” his own voice, weak, tinny, a desperate whisper.

“Shhh...” he hears Sousuke reply, serene, sage-like, as if he alone holds all the answers to Rin’s cataclysmic conundrum. “Do you hear that?”

He hears a pleasant trickle, melodious and soothing, harmonious – a wind chime on a summer’s day.

“That’s the sound of how much I give a fuck.”

“That’s the sound of your piss hitting the urinal,” Rin replies, just as calm.

“Exactly.”

 

\----

 

Haruka sends him out to buy snacks and soft drinks, when Rin starts unmistakably paying more attention to the thin line of shadow across Makoto’s cheeks than to his textbooks. His sentences drift into an obscene sigh, then a distracted silence. He’s a hazard, like this. He’d do less harm just doing Makoto’s homework for him than actually tutoring because that way he’d have a reason not to look at his face _– glasses –_ and cut his hand open with splinters from gripping a pencil way too hard.

At least that way, he won’t accidentally blurt out something embarrassing, either. He’s thankful, that for once Haruka used his alien perceptiveness for the greater good and didn’t just quietly file things away for future blackmail. The hand on his shoulder and the strict orders for pocky and umaibo pulled him out of the grave he prematurely prepared with the words that nearly slipped through his mouth.

“‘ _Hey, Makoto,’_ I said,” he chuckles darkly, looking down at package of umaibo in his hands. “What was I even going to say after that? _‘Your glasses are hot’_?”

_It’s like he doesn’t even know himself any more._

 

\----

 

"Are you stalking his Mixi profile now?"  
  
"No. I was not going through his photos the whole night. Shut up."

“Whatever you say, Rin.”

“He has selfies with his fucking glasses on. How could I not know. I feel so stupid.”

“Oh, goodie. _Now_ you realise.”

“Look this is a cry for help I need you to help me, Sousuke.”

“Your whole existence is a cry for help I wouldn’t know where to start.”

 

\----

 

Cotton-soft, his cheeks buried in his pillow. Rin tries to sleep – has been trying for the past few hours, after tossing and turning and Sousuke throwing down a pillow to his bunk. He’s still too worked up, still in panic. His heart racing with thoughts of Makoto’s glasses-framed profile. The way the bridge sits on his nose, the way a sliver of his green eyes peeks out from behind the side frames. Rin is a maiden in love – so confused, so conflicted, in the face of a love, principle-overturning.

He sighs, hugging the pillow that violently missed and hit the wall instead, falls asleep with his face buried in Sousuke’s terrible taste in pillow texture.

 

\------

 

He sees Makoto for lunch and a quiet park date Saturday. Without glasses this time, for the whole day. It’s his first time seeing him without them at least once since the past two weeks.

His heart drops, he thinks. An ache, a longing. A kind of breathlessness that leaves him empty when _he shouldn’t_ –

Under the flickering street lamp, at the very bottom of the stone stairs, they part with a kiss. A flutter of Makoto’s eyelashes by his cheek, and his face comes into focus when he steps back, a smile so warm, so angelic – Rin almost couldn’t believe he’s a glasses wearing demon sent to shatter his values and beliefs.

He sees him off, watches the hem of Makoto’s parka bounce behind him with every step.

 _Ah, yes,_ that’s definitely what Makoto is here for– a demon sent from some all-powerful deity somewhere who wants a good laugh – who somehow thought Rin’s ego was too big and needs a hammer down. There’s also the possibility that his name was picked out of a celestial hat. Or that said deity threw a dart at a cosmic globe and somehow, _somehow,_ at an odd of six billion to one, that dart lands on a poor, poor small and confused boy with red hair and teeth he is admittedly self-conscious about.

Yes, surely, that is what the greater world has in store for him.

 

\----

 

His breakthrough comes in the form of white knuckles, nails digging into Makoto’s floor cushion. The force of his confession knocks him forward with a broken gasp. “Makoto! I love you!”

The water in his glass ripples. His pencil rolls off his book, knocks into the coaster.

“Yeah?” Makoto says, tilting his head. “I love you too? What brought this up?”

“No, I mean…!” He steels himself, draws in a breath. “I love you even with glasses!”

“Huh...?”

“Glasses suck and they remind me of turbonerds like Rei, but I don’t mind if it’s you!” It’s embarrassing, being this open – putting all of himself out there for Makoto to see.

“ _Huh?!_ ” Makoto squeaks.

“It’s okay… if it’s you.” Rin finds it hard to look at him. He toys with a loose thread around the cushion zipper, channels his restlessness into idle movement. “I accept all of you, and I can live with myself being with someone who wears glasses.”

“Rin…?” Makoto’s voice is soft, low, like he thinks anything louder would break Rin, scare him away. “Has all the late nights helping me study fried your brain? Do you need to rest? Please take my bed, I’ll ask Haru to cook soup for you because I don’t want to burn the kitchen and my parents are out, and _oh, Rin,_ I am so, _so,_ sorry, I didn’t mean to tire you out, Rin”

Shocked and shattered at how his boyfriend just brushed away his heartfelt confession, his surrender of his pride – all for him – Rin stares blankly at the ceiling, counting speckle of flares from the iridescent lighting. He hears Makoto pattering away, across the hall, down the stairs. He hears the door open and close, in the far-off distant lands of the _genkan_. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, when he sees Makoto’s hand, a silhouette behind the glaring light above him, brushing stray hairs away, soft against his forehead.

Makoto’s duvet is a pleasant weight on his chest. He shouldn’t be this comfortable in the midst of feeling a swirl of complex emotions, a balanced amalgamation down the spectrum of defeat and resignation, and all the way through exasperation.

“It’s okay, just rest.” Makoto’s sweet murmurs, a gentle breath. “You’ll feel better after a nap, yeah? I promise.”

He lets his eyes slip close, his own hand reaching up, rustling the duvet, resting atop his hair splayed above Makoto’s cotton pillowcase. He falls asleep, he thinks, with warmth sliding, settling between his fingers, Makoto’s hand reassuring and comforting, soft, squeezing ever so slightly.

“Huh...?” Rin hears, faraway, idle, Makoto with a tint of slow realisation. “….was that a proposal?”

_Shit._

**Author's Note:**

> [jazz hands softly] I swear I did not write 4000 words worth of nonsense just for that piss joke (I totally did). This is all twitter user Kyroenna's fault, by the way.


End file.
